'Placing' the other: final year law students' 'imagined' experience of rural and regional practice within the law school context

This paper discusses the partial findings from a research study involving a narrative analysis of in-depth interviews with twelve final year law students. The research explored student attitudes to, and perceptions of, legal practice in rural, regional and remote (RRR) communities – that is, their ’imagined experience’. The research findings suggests that, at least in the context of the non-regional law school, the rural/regional is both absent and ‘other’, revealing the ‘urban-centric’ nature of legal education and its failure to adequately expose students to rural and regional practice contexts that can help to positively shape their ‘imagined’ experience. This paper argues that all law schools must take up the challenge of rural inclusiveness by integrating a sense of ‘place-consciousness’ into the law curriculum.